BACKGROUND: Global 'twinning' relationships between healthcare organizations and institutions in low and high-resource settings have created growing opportunities for e-health partnerships which capitalize upon expanding information technology resources worldwide. E-learning approaches to medical education are increasingly popular but remain under-investigated, whilst a new emphasis on global health teaching has coincided with university budget cuts in many high income countries. RESULTS: King's Somaliland Partnership (KSP) is a paired institutional partnership health link, supported by Tropical Health and Education Trust (THET), which works to strengthen the healthcare system and improve access to care through mutual exchange of skills, knowledge and experience between Somaliland and King's Health Partners, UK...

OBJECTIVES: Explore trainee doctors' experiences of postgraduate training and perceptions of fairness in relation to ethnicity and country of primary medical qualification. DESIGN: Qualitative semistructured focus group and interview study. SETTING: Postgraduate training in England (London, Yorkshire and Humber, Kent Surrey and Sussex) and Wales. PARTICIPANTS: 137 participants (96 trainees, 41 trainers) were purposively sampled from a framework comprising: doctors from all stages of training in general practice, medicine, obstetrics and gynaecology, psychiatry, radiology, surgery or foundation, in 4 geographical areas, from white and black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds, who qualified in the UK and abroad...

The purpose of this document is to present a review on biopolitics and psychiatry in the context of war, considering that this is where the greatest number of altered and deviant behaviours is generated. Along this line, as it is not about the psychopathology, but of its behaviour, of the approaches of Michel Foucault as regards the relationships of power, as such that it allows introducing the reader to a new perspective of thinking and understanding of the elements that have given rise to the maintenance of violent behaviour patterns and of the war itself...

Resident physicians training in psychiatry in the U.S. are required to master a body of knowledge related to cultural psychiatry; are expected to adopt attitudes that endorse the principles of cultural competence; and finally are expected to acquire specific cultural competence skills that facilitate working effectively with diverse patients. This article first provides an overview of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) competencies related to cultural competence, as well as the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry's (AACAP) recommendations for the cultural competence training of child/adolescent fellows...

BACKGROUND: The nature of a woman's orgasm has been a source of scientific, political, and cultural debate for over a century. Since the Victorian era, the pendulum has swung from the vagina to the clitoris, and to some extent back again, with the current debate stuck over whether internal sensory structures exist in the vagina that could account for orgasms based largely on their stimulation, or whether stimulation of the external glans clitoris is always necessary for orgasm. METHOD: We review the history of the clitoral versus vaginal orgasm debate as it has evolved with conflicting ideas and data from psychiatry and psychoanalysis, epidemiology, evolutionary theory, feminist political theory, physiology, and finally neuroscience...

Charting a transatlantic movement of so-called 'dynamic psychiatry' during the early twentieth century, this paper reads against the grain of established historiographies. Comparing biographical and autobiographical sources with contemporary correspondence, a history is told which considers the evolution of psychiatric knowledge and clinical practices 'from below'. Revealing a period and place when a 'dynamic' counter-culture challenged the established materialist views of Scottish psychiatry, the longevity of this challenge is considered in the concluding paragraphs...

The enteric nervous system (ENS) is recognized as a second brain because of its complexity and its largely autonomic control of bowel function. Recent progress in studying the interactions between the ENS and the central nervous system (CNS) has implicated alterations of the gut/brain axis as a possible mechanism in the pathophysiology of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), Parkinson's disease (PD) and other human CNS disorders, whereas the underlying mechanisms are largely unknown because of the lack of good model systems...

OBJECTIVES: This report identifies the institutional barriers to, and benefits of, buprenorphine maintenance treatment (BMT) integration in an established hospital-based opioid treatment program (OTP). METHODS: This case study presents the authors' experiences at the clinic, hospital, and corporation levels during efforts to integrate BMT into a hospital-based OTP in New York City and a descriptive quantitative analysis of the characteristics of hospital outpatients treated with buprenorphine from 2006 to 2013 (N=735)...

Older adults consistently prefer aging in place, which requires a high level of community support and services that are currently lacking. With a rapidly aging population, the present infrastructure for healthcare will prove even more inadequate to meet seniors' physical and mental health needs. A paradigm shift away from the sole focus on delivery of interventions at an individual level to more prevention-focused, community-based approaches will become essential. Recent initiatives have been proposed to promote healthy lifestyles and preventive care to enable older adults to age in place...

AIM: Enuresis is defined as involuntary or intentional repeated voiding of urine into clothes or bed at least twice a week for a period of three consecutive months in children older than five years old. It is one of the most frequent chronic childhood disorders. The aim of this study was to investigate the frequency of behavioural problems in children with enuresis. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The research compared 30 children aged between 7 and 11 years who had consulted to Bakırköy Prof...

There has been an ongoing debate regarding the forced use of antipsychotic medications and both the psychiatric and legal professions have reacted strongly to the growing debate. Within the penological context, cases such as Washington v. Harper, Riggins v. Nevada, and Sell v. United States established the framework for determining when antipsychotic medication may be forcibly administered. Medication decisions under the Sell and Riggins cases are to be approved at judicial hearings; whereas, administrative hearings are sufficient for Harper cases...

Community is a complex issue, especially in two particular populations overlap: Haredi society, which embraces cultural codes common to closed communities, and the mental health population characterized by its own unique needs. The present study explores the encounter experience of social workers with the cultural perceptions of mental health clients in the Haredi community in light of Community Cultural Psychiatry. A qualitative-phenomenological approach was adopted. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 27 social workers, mental health professionals, who are in contact with ultra-Orthodox Jewish clients...

The refugee movements of the recent years are confronting the health care with new challenges. However, it has turned out that in Austria data on the mental health of migrants are nearly not available. Especially data on the frequency and patterns of comorbid substance abuse of migrants with mental disorders do not exist even from international studies. We analyzed data from 1819 patients (1726 first generation, 93 second generation) treated in the outpatient clinic for transcultural psychiatry and migration related disorders at the Vienna General Hospital: In first-generation migrants the cultural and religious background of the region of origin has the greatest impact on the frequency and the patterns of misused substances...

Consideration of pain in mental health proves fundamental in psychiatry, a fortiori psychogeriatrics. The elderly person is often confronted with a painful existential situation and the experience of physical pain that go unheard. This algic component of somatic origin is still, like moral pain, too trivialized, because of becoming elderly too fast. The culture of the fight against pain needs to be developed further as well as the practical training of doctors and caregivers.

The aim of this paper to describe what Transcultural Psychiatry is. It attempts to describe stigma in Malta and how it comes about that the Mental Hospital in Malta is named for Our Lady of Mount Carmel and finally attempt to put Mount Carmel Hospital and its dedication within Maltese Culture and the culture of the Mediterranean. The paper demonstrates that to understand this, it is necessary to employ History, Anthropology, Theology, among other issues. Doing this also suggests that Malta has undergone a process of 'normalisation' regarding treatment of Mental Health Problems...

Vital to the contemporary exercise of psychiatry is the biopsychosocial approach, with psychotherapy as its well-defined, and requisite, constituent. The key objectives of psychoanalysis and other related therapies are the amelioration of symptoms and modification of character by probing the unconscious. But the practice of psychoanalysis and similar insight-oriented techniques is in developing nations is different from developed countries due to cultural and educational reasons, along with a shortage of required facilities...

This article attempts to identify and put into perspective the different approaches that could globally prevent the suffering induced by schizophrenia, from the detection of early psychosis to the impact on individual and family functioning and emotional health. Schizophrenia causes, at the community level, a number of difficult consequences and associated costs, which likely could be reduced if specific strategies, already known and documented internationally, were applied. Two areas not explored in this article: the role of medication and the issue of suicide prevention...

Niemann-Pick disease type A (NPA) is a rare lysosomal storage disorder characterized by severe neurological alterations that leads to death in childhood. Loss-of-function mutations in the acid sphingomyelinase (ASM) gene cause NPA, and result in the accumulation of sphingomyelin (SM) in lysosomes and plasma membrane of neurons. Using ASM knockout (ASMko) mice as a NPA disease model, we investigated how high SM levels contribute to neural pathology in NPA. We found high levels of oxidative stress both in neurons from these mice and a NPA patient...

Problematic internet use is common, functionally impairing, and in need of further study. Its relationship with obsessive-compulsive and impulsive disorders is unclear. Our objective was to evaluate whether problematic internet use can be predicted from recognised forms of impulsive and compulsive traits and symptomatology. We recruited volunteers aged 18 and older using media advertisements at two sites (Chicago USA, and Stellenbosch, South Africa) to complete an extensive online survey. State-of-the-art out-of-sample evaluation of machine learning predictive models was used, which included Logistic Regression, Random Forests and Naïve Bayes...